


The Way She Came Home

by Somuchbraver



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 08:53:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3441101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Somuchbraver/pseuds/Somuchbraver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a short little thing about the way it might have gone if we'd got Samantha back. Unlike a lot of wish-fulfillment scenarios Mulder has played out, it's appropriately complicated. She's not fine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way She Came Home

**Author's Note:**

> For Samantha: Because she is more than a mission, more than an objective, more than a theme. No spoilers at all, because this never happened. Takes place any time pre-Closure, but probably around season 4 or 5.

It wasn’t what he’d imagined. She could tell; the way the sparkle in his eyes had sort of dimmed when she balked halfway into a hug. He wanted to squeeze her, and part of her wanted to be squeezed, but she had learned the long and hard way to make room for herself. She hadn’t imagined this moment the way she was sure he had. She knew Fox a little, little bits of things, like that he was unreasonably brave, louder than anyone gave him credit for, and that he was a dreamer. He thought about space, and vampires, he believed in magic. Samantha barely remembered a time that she’d once believed in magic.

She’d come back wrong- a teenager for some reason after all these years. His redheaded partner was as fascinated by the implications as she was skeptical about how it was possible. They were both skeptical, as it turned out. He’d held out on her when she flatly turned down the battery of tests he’d proposed. He didn’t seem to catch why that thought terrified her; why it was far beyond out of bounds. She’d been expected to launch into his life joyfully and to prove her authenticity all at once. Everyone in is life treated her like a gravestone. Everyone in his life was fitting her for a pedestal. She was a far cry from the fiction he’d whipped up over the last twenty years.

What she’d been was a fourteen year old homeless girl. Her greatest accomplishment had been survival, and her greatest achievement was her continued freedom. He wasn’t going to get to rescue her. She hadn’t been the kind of girl you could rescue for years. She’d hardened, protected, calcified. She wore fear differently than a young girl was supposed to, so when someone came near her with a needle or she heard the sound of a drill or vacuum, she was more liable to give someone a black eye than to quiver with fear. Quivering didn’t do you any good, crying never worked, and she had learned how to clamp down on the anxiety when it bubbled up, to grind her teeth until her head ached, to dig her fingernails into the flesh of her upper arm.

There was never any getting around his disappointment. They had to get through it. They had to awkwardly toe that line, they had to make lunch dates, dodge topics, and measure out cup by cup bits of their lives to give to each other. Until one day he realized his sister was funny, until one day he realized his sister didn’t have many tears left, until one important day he noticed her squeezing her arm so hard and pried the fingernails out of her flesh and folded her hands under his. Until he realized she was never going to be able to talk about what happened and she realized he wasn’t going to make that a condition of their relationship.

So when they were wandering through the Lincoln memorial and the sun caught her just right in the eyes and blinded her for a moment that seemed like it lasted a full hour he knew she’d be more embarrassed than anything and didn’t try to hug her until later that day when they were camped out on the couch at his place and she suddenly shuddered into his side. He draped one arm awkwardly and wrapped the other up around her, pushing her dark hair away from her face. It wasn’t what he’d expected or even what he’d hoped but it was definitely a hug worth waiting for.


End file.
